Sentilla Blog

When it comes to management, one of the things I ask customers is what management tools they use.  There's always a laundry list, some open-source (like Nagios) and some from large software vendors (like Tivoli).  These IT management tools are used to get a handle on computing, storage, networking, and applications -- 4 of the primary assets in a data center.  But when I ask what they use for energy management, there's usually a blank stare.  Energy, as you may have guessed, is the fifth major asset.  As with any of these assets, if you run out of capacity, your applications go down.  If you don't manage them proactively, your performance suffers.  Energy is no different.  And with pressure to reduce cost, improve performance, plan for increased or decreased capacity, or mitigate potential risks, management tools are the key to accomplishing these tasks. 

Awareness of the importance of energy in the data center has grown dramatically in the last few years.  And due to the importance of energy in business continutity and contribution to data center operating costs, it is logical that it is time to get a handle on energy in 2010.

In the process of releasing application tracking in Sentilla Energy Manager, we had some great discussions with Dave Cappuccio and Rakesh Kumar.  Our conversations turned to "How do you measure efficiency in the data center?"  Of course, we all argue that PUE is not the right metric for determining the efficiency of a data center.  Instead, there needs to be more metrics around the applications, their workload, and the overhead they incur.  These metrics are at the core of the new application tracking release of Sentilla Energy Manager.

"The new efficiency metric for data centers is compute per kilowatt," said David Cappuccio, managing vice president and chief of research for the infrastructure teams, Gartner. "Application energy and cost information is becoming critical for enterprises concerned with optimizing their infrastructures. IT organizations armed with this information will increase their adoption of virtualization and realize energy savings and consolidation benefits more quickly."

If you are attending the Gartner Symposium/ITXpo next week, you are in for a treat!

Renowned Expert and CTO, Dr. Joe Polastre, will present on the Modern Data Factory.  A winner of Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal 40 Under 40 award and named one of BusinessWeek’s Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs, Dr. Polastre will bring to center stage his innovative concept of managing data centers like modern factories: industrializing them to optimal output with minimized capital investment and operating costs. He will share best practices for data center managers faced with immense challenges in aligning activities with business objectives while keeping costs low.

Bring your questions and ideas to Dr. Polastre’s presentation. Also, come by the Sentilla booths to see a demonstration of Sentilla data center analytics!